codecartooning

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tumblr_n2g3q1drXf1rc43lao1_500

animated GIF from the Tumblr codecartooning, by John Pound (via ptato0)

Pound's caption for the above is

#061, “NO MYSTERIES HERE”, a randomly generated animated landscape drawn purely in JavaScript and HTML5 Canvas, then converted to GIF.

The conversion to GIF is still a necessary step because (i) it makes the animation readable in any browser and (ii) for me at least, it adds a slight tinge of frame-lagged imperfection that I might not get from say, one of those sucky Google search page illustrations. Pound has posted his own pros & cons of drawing with code:

Cons:

Learning curve
Less direct or intuitive
Slower than using a pencil
Bigger effort for a single drawing
No original art
Uses electricity

Pros:

Precision
Randomness
Repetition
Reuseable code parts
Many varied drawings from one source
Easy reproduction
Makes animations
Luminous screen
Vector art scales to any size
Source code can be shared
Free code = free tools

Am not terribly interested in learning the Javascript/CSS method [so-called HTML5] myself. My own "pros" of not drawing with code are, liking the control, discipline, and individual quirky result of drawing frame by frame using hand-drawn lines, curves and shading [tablet and/or drawing program], seeing what happens when the frames come together, and then revising -- much the way I might work on a painting. Revisions and uncertainty that you can see or feel in the result are a necessary part of art, for me. "Using electricity" is going to be an ultimate downer once our unsustainable culture burns itself out, but that's also one reason I kind of want to use these tools while we have them, to be part of the current moment, rather than keeping a candle going for historical working methods.

reply to joshua decter's reply

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Joshua Decter didn't so much reply on Rhizome to my post, joshua decter: gallery art critic as new media artist, as attempt to pummel me into submission: his response is more than twice as long as what I originally wrote, and filled with high dudgeon about supposed errors, misrepresentations, and willful misunderstandings. "Doth protest too much" comes to mind. Anyway there was one mistake; here's what I wrote in response:

Mr. Decter points out a factual error in my post -- I wrote that in his "Screen" show he "placed TV cameras in the room to film the works." I updated the post to describe more accurately how video images of the works appeared in the gallery.* Apologies for the error.
Otherwise, I think we mostly have differences of opinion, not fact. Mr. Decter's sense is that virtual curator and virtual artist displays aren't (or weren't) common in museum programming; my sense is that they are (or were). Who did them first doesn't really matter if they are unhelpful, as in overly reductive, ideas. My point in mentioning Google Sketch-Up wasn't to say it was around in 1999. Clearly it wasn't. It was to make a connection between what Mr. Decter was doing with then-current 3D software and what artists are still doing with virtual "white cube"-placed objects ("[reducing the slow] process of artistic thought and individuation of ... physical collections to simplified mix and match objects," I wrote in the post). Yesterday's unfortunate idea is today's unfortunate trend.
I haven't read Mr. Decter's book, the release of which roughly coincided with this Rhizome post. Here's hoping he'll be joining the conversation on the vagaries of post-internet art, or po-net, as some are calling it! These issues are too important to leave to Hollywood collectors.

*Decter explained that he "took photographs of the installation of artworks, digitized these images, and worked with an editor on an AVID system at a professional studio to generate a video catalogue of the exhibition. This video catalogue was distributed as the only catalogue of the show, and was also played on video monitors within the gallery during the run of the show." I saw the show in 1996 and assumed he had cameras in the room -- you would indeed have had to read the press release to learn about this much more cumbersome process.

error strata

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banded_static

Crop from a larger GIF posted by a Dump.fm user/troll. I took a section out of the middle of his GIF, which was about twice this size.

I like these GIFs that look like pixelated analog TV static, and prefer the above to similar ones of more self-consciously made or art nature, such as this elegant but rather stiff and claustrophobic specimen by Dylan Fisher or even these neo-psychedelic pixel art examples by Emilio Gomariz (to cite a couple from Art F City's "Gif of the Day" posts). Those have a very controlled, art-directed look in the sense of, "made by a professional illustrator." Whereas the one above looks like it just happened, or happened onstage when a punk band's amplifier blew during a two-note lead guitar solo and accidentally fried the Veejay's video display (if punk bands had Veejays). Or, think, early Steve Reich with tape recorders vs Music for 18 Musicians after Reich became polished and self-consciously classical.
The one above is 400 x 400 pixels, 221 KB, so rather modest in terms of trying to impress anyone with a "blow you away" art experience. It's relatively easy, however, to enlarge it for more walk-up impact: see this 800 x 798 pixel version at 572 KB.
Opening the GIF up, I noticed it had several 1 x 1 pixel frames. I removed them to see what would happen, and realized they were important in creating the jerky, random movement of the "strata" above. So they came back in. On the subject of randomness, one of the most appealing things here is the apparent directional movement of those strata, some fast, some slow, some going right, some going left, some bouncing up and down. A programmer could put all those variables in (maybe someone did here) but the trick would be to hide the methodology or obvious thought processes. Otherwise you have a "library music" version of punk.